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The May 7th UK elections have brought to fruition a political crisis that has been developing since 2020. About a third of municipal legislative seats in England were up for re-election, while every seat in the Welsh and Scottish parliaments was contested. The results have been devastating for Labour, which has lost control of municipalities that it held for decades. While the continued domination of the left-leaning Scottish National Party in the Scottish Parliament is unsurprising, it is the results in Wales that are hardest for the Labour Party to bear. The former mining and industrial regions of South Wales, much more densely populated than the rural North, are historically the most militant heartland of the British labour movement, and Labour has dominated Welsh politics since the 1920s. But the party has been pushed into third place in the Senedd (the Welsh parliament), behind the left nationalist Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) and the far-right Reform UK.
Labour Collapse
The most immediately striking fact about the election results is that support for Labour has collapsed everywhere, even from its relatively low level at the 2024 General Election, when the party won a huge parliamentary majority with less than 34% of the popular vote (because the right-wing vote was divided between the Conservative Party and Reform). Centrist commentators have tended to attribute this outcome to Keir Starmer’s lack of personal charisma and his poor judgement in appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, despite his close links and business dealings with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, Starmer’s historically unprecedented unpopularity has far deeper roots. The contempt that he has shown for the Labour membership that elected him in 2020 has been extraordinary; he broke every promise made to them during the leadership election, while suspending or expelling thousands of leftists on spurious grounds, not least the beloved Jeremy Corbyn. This was all supposed to endear him to centrist voters. But in an age of platform media, aggravating and alienating hundreds of thousands of highly engaged citizens (and their friends, families, neighbours and social-media contacts) has instead contributed to a widespread sense of his duplicity and lack of principle. Starmer’s government has enacted progressive reforms: some improvements to rights for workers and renters, some increases in public spending, some patchy extensions of public ownership. But the vast majority of voters feel that far more dramatic change is needed to begin to address the short-term cost-of-living crisis and the long-term consequences of decades of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and austerity.
The contempt that Starmer has shown for the Labour membership that elected him in 2020 has been extraordinary; he broke every promise made to them during the leadership election, while suspending or expelling thousands of leftists on spurious grounds, not least the beloved Jeremy Corbyn.
What exactly voters want is not always entirely clear. If one were to try to derive an aggregate set of demands from opinion polls and attitude surveys, the list would probably include a radical programme to rebuild the social democratic settlement, and drastic reductions in net immigration, but very little of the kind of conservative culture-war agenda that is normally assumed to go along with any such policy. Labour has attempted to position itself as the vehicle for such a compromise, but its approach to immigration has been too spectacularly punitive towards the most vulnerable to do anything but alienate much of its own base, while its socio-economic reforms have not gone far enough to win over working-class voters tempted by Reform’s promise of even more draconian anti-immigration measures.
Reform UK has been a major political force, fueled in part by millionaire donors and by the propaganda vehicle that is the privately funded TV channel, GB News, since the Conservative Party’s own collapse in 2024. Most evidence suggests that Reform has actually won little support from ex-Labour voters, even if such swings do happen, and can prove strategically crucial in a handful of localities. What has proven far more damaging for Labour has been the extraordinary surge in support for the Green Party under the leadership of Zack Polanski since his election in September 2025. Polanski’s left-populist attacks on the long legacy of Thatcherism have proven remarkably effective, helping the Greens to win a hugely significant parliamentary by-election in Manchester in February.
The Gorton and Denton by-election marked a potentially historic turning point in UK politics, crystallising and intensifying many longer-term trends. The popular Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, had emerged over the previous year as the standard-bearer for a hypothetical radical alternative to Starmerism. A cabinet minister in the Blair and Brown governments, Burnham had also served on Corbyn’s front bench, declining to join his former colleagues in their failed attempt to unseat him in 2016. During his time as mayor of the Northern city, he had built a significant profile as a critic of Starmer’s centrism and as almost the only politician interested in the UK to enjoy net positive popularity ratings with the wider public. As Starmer’s popularity and Labour’s poll numbers plummeted, the idea of a Burnham leadership (a position that he had twice failed to secure already, in 2010 and 2015) began to seem both plausible and attractive to party members and to the leaders of the trade unions that founded, and still exert huge influence over, the Labour Party.
When Burnham announced his intention to put himself forward for selection as a candidate in the by-election, it was widely understood that this was the first stage of a bid for the party leadership (Labour rules stipulate that any leadership candidate must be a Member of Parliament). In a historically unprecedented, and transparently self-serving move, Starmer requested that the National Executive Committee rule Burnham, as a sitting mayor, ineligible for selection. Stuffed with delegates from the party’s right, the NEC duly complied. Furious voters in Gorton and Denton replied by electing the likeable and articulate Green, Hanna Spencer, instead of Labour’s official candidate, in a seat that many had predicted might actually fall to Reform. Reform didn’t come close to winning, but did perform well in the older and more traditionally working-class parts of the constituency, in a sign of things to come at the May local elections.
Starmer’s arbitrary intervention echoed the huge efforts to intervene in local candidate selections running up to the 2024 General Election made by a right-wing factional network headed by his notorious chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Over 200 Labour candidates were imposed upon local parties in favour of more popular, and almost always more capable local figures, as McSweeney (cheered-on by Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair) sought to ensure absolute compliance with Starmer’s centrist, Atlanticist agenda amongst any future parliamentary party. Nowhere were such interventions resented more than in Wales, where the previously successful project to maintain a more distinctively leftist identity for Welsh Labour was largely extinguished by them.
An unprecedented statement was issued last week by the leaderships of every affiliated union, declaring that Starmer cannot lead Labour into the next election.
The scale of McSweeney’s influence and corruption was largely unknown to the wider public in 2024, but a series of exposés since then have made it common knowledge that his network, centred on the millionaire-funded organisation Labour Together, had been engaging in underhand and deeply sectarian activities against almost everyone in the Labour Party who happened not to be part of their right-wing, pro-Israel network for several years; including paying a detective agency to spy on critical journalists. Above all, what has discredited this tendency and brought them to light is the public admission that it was McSweeney who lobbied for his hero Peter Mandelson to be appointed ambassador to the US. Never in modern UK history has a clandestine factional project unravelled so quickly, so completely and so publicly.
The Aftermath of the May Elections
Although the results of the local and devolved elections were never in doubt, conforming as they did to most opinion polls since February, the reality that they have revealed provoked a predictable crisis for Starmer’s leadership. Hundreds of MPs now face the prospect of losing their seats at the next election, just as thousands of local councillors have already lost theirs. Labour having performed as the third most popular party in both England and Wales, with no prospect of recovering its pre-2015 dominance in Scotland, has convinced at least a significant section of the Parliamentary party to call for his resignation or replacement. More significantly, an unprecedented statement was issued last week by the leaderships of every affiliated union, declaring that Starmer cannot lead Labour into the next election.
Burnham’s local popularity, and the perception that he represents a different politics to that which has dominated Labour since 2020, will probably carry him to victory, and then to the Labour leadership and No 10 Downing Street. But that outcome is by no means certain.
This was the context for the dramatic and unexpected announcement that ambitious young Labour MP Josh Simons, until recently a Starmer loyalist and himself a disgraced key figure in the Labour Together network, had decided to step down from parliament in order to trigger a by-election at which Burnham could again put himself forward as a candidate. Starmer and the Labour NEC announced within a day that Burnham would not be prevented from running in Makerfield. This is a constituency that, like Gorton & Denton, falls well within Burnham’s zone of maximum popularity in Greater Manchester. By contrast, however, the Greens and their youthful, multicultural, metropolitan demographic have little presence there. This is a traditional Northern heartland seat on the edge of Wigan, one of the iconic ‘mill towns’ of the English industrial revolution. At last week’s local elections, Reform UK took almost every contested seat from Labour, often with over 50% of the vote. Burnham’s local popularity, and the perception that he represents a different politics to that which has dominated Labour since 2020, will probably carry him to victory, and then to the Labour leadership and No 10 Downing Street. But that outcome is by no means certain.
On a longer historical scale, the current crisis in UK politics is symptomatic of a number of long-term and global trends. Since the 1960s, the British electoral and party system has turned out to be almost uniquely maladapted to the general fragmentation and diversification of advanced capitalist societies, effectively disenfranchising more voters and enfranchising fewer with every passing year. The rise in support for newer parties, further away from the technocratic liberalism of the political ‘centre’, is a reaction to this democratic failure, but also one expression of an almost universal frustration with the legacy of Thatcherism, New Labour, austerity and Brexit. The Labour bureaucracy’s willingness to let Burnham stand in Makerfield, after blocking his candidacy in Gorton & Denton three months earlier, is in part a sign of the total exhaustion of the professional political class that has governed Britain, and most Western countries, since the 1980s; an exhaustion symbolised in Britain by the spectacular fall of Peter Mandelson, and the discrediting of his managerial, marketing-led, billionaire-friendly politics.
Burnham’s Rivals
If Burnham is beaten in Makerfield, the consequences for Labour are hard to predict. The party’s right dreams of installing an authoritarian social conservative leadership, believing that this could win back Reform voters. But there is almost no plausible scenario in which Labour Party members elect such a figure; and it is they who will have the final say over the choice of leader, following a nominations process that demands candidates receive the backing both of significant numbers of MPs and of affiliated unions. The favoured candidate of the surviving Blairite current is former Health minister Wes Streeting, a notoriously factional figure who began his career as the first president of the National Union of Students to hail from Labour’s right wing since the 1960s. Streeting’s resignation, and his calls for Starmer to step down, came as no surprise last week, as he had been rumoured to have been preparing a leadership bid for months.
What was a surprise, however, was his failure to launch any such bid, and his public call for Burnham to be allowed to stand for a parliamentary seat and thereby enter the contest. Streeting has since implied that he intends to stand if and when Burnham launches a challenge to Starmer, on a platform that will focus on reversing Brexit. Whether this is a serious bid for the leadership is unclear. The policy is popular with affluent centrist voters, but Streeting himself is not liked either by Labour members or by his own parliamentary constituents, in a multicultural, working-class district of outer London, where he was very nearly ousted in 2024 by a previously unknown independent pro-Gaza candidate. His image has been further tarnished by his very public association with Peter Mandelson. What is fascinating about Streeting is that he too seems to have grasped that the era of Third Way technocracy is over; that he must actually win a democratic mandate with a popular position, or accept the leadership of a figure such as Burnham, who can.
Given Streeting’s unpopularity, a Burnham defeat in Makerfield is likely to lead to one of two other figures challenging Starmer for the leadership. Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband both belong to the same ‘soft left’ tradition within the party with which Burnham himself has become associated, even though their backstories could hardly be more different. Miliband, the Oxford-educated son of the famous Marxist social theorist, Ralph Miliband, has already enjoyed (or endured) a 5-year stint as Labour leader (2010-5) that ended in electoral defeat. Rayner, who left school at 16 as a single mother and came up through the trade union bureaucracy, was deputy leader of the party until last year, when she stood down because the tax authorities were investigating a set of alleged irregularities for which she has recently been entirely exonerated. But neither Miliband nor Rayner seem to want to serve as Labour leader or Prime Minister at this time. They also do not seem to have any clearly defined policy agenda. In fact, both would prefer to serve as senior figures in a government led by their far more popular colleague, Andy Burnham. Fortunately for them, Burnham remains highly likely to take his seat in the coming Makerfield by-election.
A Clarifying Moment
Whether Burnham can genuinely enact the historic break with neoliberalism that he claims to want remains to be seen. Many are skeptical, given his ministerial career as a New Labour loyalist. However, the local election results have made clear that despite their extraordinary success in metropolitan municipalities and university towns, the Green Party does not look likely to be able to effectively confront Reform in the smaller post-industrial towns, where they now threaten to terminate the century-long hegemony of the labour movement. Last year, many dreamed that a new party of the socialist left, led by Jeremy Corbyn, might be able to carry out that task. But the almost complete implosion of Corbyn’s Your Party has put an end to such reveries. Without some kind of effective cooperation between an insurgent Green Party, left nationalists, a recovered Labour Party and even the centrist Liberal Democrats, all polls indicate that a Reform / Conservative coalition awaits on the other side of the 2029 General Election.
The ideal strategic division of labour between the Labour Party and the Greens currently seems obvious from the perspective of the non-partisan left: we want the Greens to win as widely as possible, but we recognise they cannot be the sole vehicle to block Reform. Entirely abandoning the struggle inside the Labour Party is not an option either; Your Party is a dead end, and will not stop the rise of Reform in the post-industrial regions.
This, at least, puts British socialists in a relatively clear position. Doubts as to whether to put energy into Your Party, the Greens or the Labour left can probably be put to rest now, given that the ideal strategic division of labour between the Labour Party and the Greens currently seems obvious, at least from the perspective of the non-partisan left: we want the Greens to win as widely as possible, but we recognise they cannot be the sole vehicle to block Reform. Entirely abandoning the struggle inside the Labour Party is not an option either; Your Party is a dead end, and will not stop the rise of Reform in the post-industrial regions.
But might the hopes that many invested in Your Party be better invested in some new type of non-party socialist organisation, like the Democratic Socialists of America, or the (failed, but perhaps ahead of its time) Socialist Movement? That remains a plausible possibility, given that neither the Greens, nor a Labour Party led by Andy Burnham, look likely to offer a fully satisfactory expression of the socialist politics which hundreds of thousands in Britain do share. Experimenting with new forms of organisation may now be exactly what’s required, if a united front against the far right is to become both a genuine possibility, and something more than a cover for centrist restoration.
